By Emmanuel Lopez Guest reviewer Ace Combat:Assault Horizon, the latest installment in the venerable console flight sim (I use that word loosely), returns and it does so with a huge shake-up. Or rather, a whole bunch of them. This incarnation… Continue Reading →

Ace Combat:Assault Horizon, the latest installment in the venerable console flight sim (I use that word loosely), returns and it does so with a huge shake-up. Or rather, a whole bunch of them.

This incarnation moves away from the fictional nations of the previous games and into the real world — or at least a world populated by clichés seen in every military first-person shooter that isn’t set in World War II. That includes everything from treacherous Russians, gratuitous explosions and a whole lot of chest-pounding bravado.

In short, said group of treacherous Russians – who have taken to calling themselves the New Russian Federation – is seeking to overthrow the current Moscow government. To pursue this end, the NRF have acquired a devastating new bomb called the Trinity.

Playing as various members of NATO’s 108th Task Force, your task is to stop them. Unlike the real-life NATO, that doesn’t mean imposing economic sanctions and sending out sternly worded letters to rogue nations. That means flying into a war zone, guns blazing and missiles flying.

GETTING IN CHARACTER: In Assault Horizon, you’re no longer just a faceless call sign. Various missions will put you in the flight suits of several characters including Lt. Colonel William Bishop, commanding officer of the Warwolf fighter squadron; Maj. Janice Rehl, lead pilot of the Razor 1 flight crew; and Capt. Doug “D-Ray” Robinson, commanding officer of the Nomad helicopter squadron.

Namco Bandai and Project Aces brought in best-selling military novelist Jim DeFelice to craft a realistic and more character-driven narrative, but I found it hard to see the characters as anything other than action-movie archetypes.

GORGEOUS VISUALS: This game is by far the prettiest Ace Combat entry to date. Battlefields include Washington, D.C.; Dubai, UAE; and Moscow and all of them have been faithfully re-created in astonishing detail.

It’s cool to pick out landmarks such as the Washington Monument or the Kremlin from thousands of feet in the air.

But as always, the name of the game is planes, and there are a crazy number to choose from as the story unfolds.

Flying the unfriendly skies in the jet of your choice is the bread-and-butter of Assault Horizon. Some missions will challenge you to eliminate bogeys in air-to-air combat, while other sorties are to provide support to ground forces below.

DOGFIGHT MODE TAKES FUN OUT OF DOGFIGHTS: Each plane is geared toward a certain role; some jets are better at shooting down enemy aircraft, while others are suited for ground assaults.

New to Assault Horizon are Dogfight Mode (DFM) and Airstrike Mode (ASM). Tapping both top shoulder buttons when you get close to an enemy plane shifts to DFM, a sort of minigame in which the goal is to stay close enough to get a missile lock or to dispatch the opponent with your machine guns.

It looks snazzy and exciting until you realize that the actual flying is automated and the only thing you have to do is the shooting.

It’s close to impossible to shoot down enemy pilots without using DFM, which turns aerial combat into a tiresome sequence of chasing down a target, going into DFM and blasting the it out of the sky.

Something has to be said for the joy of executing a textbook-perfect Immelman turn or the Pugachev’s Cobra (if you really want to get fancy) to send a missile up an enemy’s tailpipe. Assault Horizon, unfortunately, robs wannabe pilots of that experience.

ASM works the same way as DFM, except you must guide your plane to a predetermined spot. Locking onto this spot and triggering it sends you along a predetermined flight path, leaving you free to blast away with your guns and missiles.

It’s not as restrictive as DFM, but sometimes triggering an ASM marker from an odd angle results in some unrealistic turns that can be a little jarring.

GET TO THE CHOPPER MISSIONS: For the first time in the Ace Combat franchise, a few missions pop up that involve piloting helicopters and providing fire support as chopper gunner.

These missions are placed as a palate cleanser between sorties in jets, but because they seem somewhat underdeveloped, they feel a little forced.

The gunner segments are like a shooter-on-rails where you must provide air support to ground forces below. It’s a simple premise — point your targeting reticle at the bad guys and shoot — that quickly wears thin after a few excessively long segments.

The helicopter-based missions are somewhat the same.

Aside from having to actually control the chopper, these missions don’t feel that much more developed than from the shoot-em-up dynamic of the gunner segments. You just plod through them in a rush to get back into a jet.

EXPLOSIONS AND PROBLEMS WITH THE PACING: I have to give credit for Assault Horizon’s slick presentation. It’s presented with all the visual flair of a Michael Bay movie with the camera periodically cutting away to show off a spectacular explosion or a major event taking place in another part of the battlefield.

When you shoot down an enemy plane, its destruction is shown in gratuitous slow-motion. It’s cool to see the first few times it happens, but you get oversaturated with it in a hurry, especially when it starts to cut away from more pressing matters.

Overall, the game suffers from dreadful pacing.

The missions take far too long, with some brutal checkpoint spacing in some sorties. At far too many points, I found myself heaving a sigh of relief at completing a particularly tough section, only to find out another objective has cropped up.

The game does auto-save at checkpoints thankfully. When the chime signaling a completed mission comes up (using the same sound effect as every other game in the series), I was too burned out to even care.

What’s even more aggravating is that your AI teammates seem to be nothing more than empty radio chatter.

While I’m flying around shooting down anything that isn’t marked “ally” on my radar or trying to shake off a bogey on my six, I’m not really sure what they’re doing. I think I’ve only seen a teammate shoot down a plane once or twice.

GOOD MULTIPLAYER MODES: The game does take a slight turn for the better with multiplayer. You and a buddy can team up and tackle a few of the campaign missions cooperatively, or duel thousands of feet in the air to see who’s the top gun. Capital Conquest pits two opposing teams who must protect their base from the other squad.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon takes some bold steps to try and keep the series fresh while attempting to make itself accessible to the uninitiated.

But it feels like everything longtime Ace Combat fans enjoyed about the series was thrown out the window to rope in the Call of Duty crowd.

Assault Horizon more often feels like playing a video game that forgets it’s a video game.

The presentation would make any Hollywood producer jealous, but deep down, there’s nothing of substance and certainly nothing that would persuade Ace Combat fans that it belongs in the series.